Obama, Holder, Sharpton Stoke Flames, Ferguson Officers Shot

AP Photo/Jeff RobersonBEN SHAPIRO12 Mar 2015

On Wednesday evening, two police officers were shot in Ferguson, Missouri after months of race-baiting from President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, the White House’s favorite race-baiter Al Sharpton, and their compliant media allies.

One of the officers was shot in the face, the other in the shoulder. Neither was from Ferguson; one was from the St. Louis County Police Department and another was from the Webster Groves Police Department. As St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said, “These police officers were standing there and they were shot, just because they were police officers. I have said all along that we cannot sustain this forever without problems.”

The shootings followed nearly a year of protest and rage springing from the Ferguson black community in the wake of the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson. The media, particularly Sharpton, jumped to portray Brown, a bully and strong-arm robber who tried to take Wilson’s gun off of him and punched him in the face, as a “gentle giant.” They jumped to portray Wilson as a racist white officer acting out The Birth of a Nation. The media and government officials both pushed the absolute lie that Brown had his hands up and told Wilson not to shoot, prompting protests around the country with celebrities holding up their hands in the now-infamous “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” signal. Ferguson exploded into riots, with local stores burned down and police officers attacked.

But Holder then issued a second DOJ report stating that the Ferguson police department was wildly and institutionally racist. The evidence: radically elevated rates of traffic stops without concomitant evidence of elevated traffic crime, admittedly because the city had jacked up its traffic enforcement to raise revenue; blacks were disproportionately arrested, which also happens to be true across America thanks to higher rates of criminal activity among blacks on a proportional basis by every available measure; and “several” members of the 72-person Ferguson Police Department sent or received racist emails (the DOJ neglected to mention just how many officers were involved, but two officers quit and a court clerk was fired).

As a result, the police chief, Thomas Jackson, stepped down last night. Protesters saw an opportunity, and someone in the crowd shot cops.

Are we supposed to be surprised by this chain of events? We’ve seen it already in New York City, where two cops were shot “execution-style” after the Mayor of New York, Bill De Blasio, suggested that the death of Eric Garner was just more evidence that black people, including his son, should fear the police. Naturally, the media sided with De Blasio when NYPD officers literally turned their backs on him. Back in December, Seattle police arrested Jaleel Tariq Abdul-Jabbaar for threatening to murder Darren Wilson. I wrote back in September that former White House green czar Van Jones had told me that blacks “jump[ed] to conclusions” because for blacks, police were the equivalent of “Nazis or Hamas” for Jews. If you truly believe that the cops are Nazis or Hamas, you have a moral obligation to kill them.

Cops always have a dangerous job. But purposeful ambushes of cops during protests do not occur in a political vacuum. Here are the worst, completely fact-free critiques of the Ferguson Police Department – critiques that helped stoke the fires of an anti-police war that will end with more attacks on police:

I realize that America’s critics will be quick to point out that at times we too have failed to live up to our ideals; that America has plenty of problems within its own borders. This is true. In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri — where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So, yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions. And like every country, we continually wrestle with how to reconcile the vast changes wrought by globalization and greater diversity with the traditions that we hold dear.

In November, Al Sharpton reported that Obama told him to “stay[] on course in terms of pursuing what it was that he knew we were advocating.” In December, Obama stated in response to protests over supposed police racism that such racism was “deeply rooted in our society, it’s deeply rooted in our history” and that there was “deep unfairness” in law enforcement. He added:

As I said last week in the wake of the grand jury decision, I think Ferguson laid bare a problem that is not unique to St. Louis or that area, and is not unique to our time, and that is a simmering distrust that exists between too many police departments and too many communities of color. The sense that in a country where one of our basic principles, perhaps the most important principle, is equality under the law, that too many individuals, particularly young people of color, do not feel as if they are being treated fairly.

Attorney General Eric Holder: Holder’s DOJ has targeted “biased policing” and “implicit bias” – in other words, Holder believes that anytime more blacks are arrested than whites, the source is police racism. When the DOJ targeted the Seattle Police Department, for example, their letter stated that officers were engaging in “discriminatory practices subconsciously.” Crime skyrocketed in Seattle as a result of the consent decree with the police. In November, Holder equated Michael Brown, a thug who attacked a police officer, with Emmett Till, a 14-year-old teenager murdered in Mississippi in 1955:

The struggle goes on. And it’s not only Ferguson, there are other communities around our country where we are dealing with relationships that are not what they should be, be they official communities they are supposed to serve or whether it’s on a more personal level. There is enduring legacy that Emmett Till has left with us that we still have to confront as a nation.

Seen in this context, amid a highly toxic environment, defined by mistrust and resentment, stoked by years of bad feelings and spurred by illegal and misguided practices, it is not difficult to imagine how a single tragic incident set off the city of Ferguson like a powder keg.

Al Sharpton: Sharpton, who has a long history of slandering law enforcement going all the way back to Tawana Brawley, immediately labeled Brown a “gentle giant” and said, just days after the Brown shooting, “We have had enough.” He said, “Michael Brown’s going to change this town.” At Brown’s funeral, Sharpton sounded off:

America, it’s time to deal with policing! We are not the haters, we’re the healers!… No community in America would tolerate an 18-year-old boy laying in the street four and a half hours and we not going to tolerate it either. Whatever happened, the value of this boy’s life must be answered by somebody.

The media parroted all of this, slandering Wilson, slandering the Ferguson police, and slandering police across the country. The memes of Obama, Holder, and Sharpton have now pervaded the popular culture. Diddy, 2 Chainz, The Game, and Rick Ross, among others, cut a song titled “Don’t Shoot” which carried the following lyrics: “They killin’ teens, they killin’ dreams, it’s murder… Black men, we pay the toll, the price is your life, Uncle Sam want a slice, black dress code now we looting in the night, now we throwing Molotovs in this Holocaust.” Members of the Selma cast, including the director, posed in the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” motion. So did five members of the St. Louis Rams. So did CNN hosts. So did thousands of misguided protesters around the country, told by their leaders that to slander police is virtue.

And so anti-police rage boils to the surface, encouraged by the White House, encouraged by the Attorney General, and encouraged by its media sycophants. Innocent men are shot. And all of those who helped label cops racist throw up their hands in faux horror.